How to cook in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is something you should familiarize yourself with quickly. Eating cooked food isn’t just more effective for keeping Henry healthy than consuming raw food. It’s a way to keep food items from spoiling, though some cooking methods are more useful for this compared to others.
Our Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 cooking guide explains how to start the process and what kinds of cooking are best for which scenarios.
How to cook in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
- At a pot for more health
- At a smokehouse for better preservation
- On a drying rack to avoid food poisoning
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: Cooking at a cook pot
The first Kingdom Come Deliverance let you add any ingredients to any cookpot, but the sequel handles things a bit differently. Only specific pots work for cooking in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Some people say you can use any pot in a tavern, but in our experience, that’s not actually the case. Most pots in taverns have food already in them, and the only options for interacting involve eating from the pot – which is stealing – or using a potion.
The only cook pots we’ve successfully cooked with are empty ones at campsites. Abandoned camps don’t have them, or not the ones we’ve seen, anyway, but campsites by the road where other people are present do. How useful these sites are depends on your playstyle, but it’s worth tracking them down just to make some meals when you’ve got the right ingredients.
You can cook anything in a pot – fruits, mushrooms, meats, entire recipes. However, food cooked in a pot does eventually spoil, the same as uncooked ingredients, so plan to eat what you cook within a couple of in-game days. On the bright side, food cooked in a pot has the most restorative potential compared to other types of cooked foods.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: Cooking at a smokehouse
A second option, and one that ensures the finished product remains unspoiled for longer, is cooking at a smokehouse. Most settlements have at least one smokehouse, typically near the butcher, but sometimes in other locations as well. At a smokehouse, you can only cook:
Interact with the smokehouse, select what you want to smoke, and despite smoking taking a long time in real life, you’ll get it back instantly. Smoked food counts as preserved, so while it will spoil, the process takes longer than with raw food or food cooked in a pot.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: Cooking at a drying rack
Okay, so using a drying rack isn’t exactly cooking in the usual meaning of the word, but in the sense that it takes raw ingredients and transforms them into something else, it works. That’s how Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 treats it, anyway. Drying racks let you place meats, fruits, mushrooms, and herbs on the rack and instantly get their dried form in return.
Dried food lasts the longest before spoiling, but it restores the least amount of health. That sounds dire, though the difference between the amount of health cooked and dried food restore is small enough to not make a noteworthy difference. The benefit of having food items that won’t spoil quickly are more important anyway, and that’s especially true if you have rarer ingredients, such as belladonna, that you can’t easily replace.
If you don’t want to find alternative methods of entry to reach that drying rack in particular, head over to our Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 lockpicking guide for tips on breaking and entering, and check out our KCD 2 treasure map guide for some tips on finding the best loot.